


Only One Bed

by Anam_Writes



Series: the things you can't read aloud at the war table [7]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Breakfast in Bed, F/M, Fake Marriage, Pining, Roleplay, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-13
Updated: 2020-05-13
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:15:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24158722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anam_Writes/pseuds/Anam_Writes
Summary: You know the trope.Byleth and Claude get caught in some unfortunate rain and have to convince a sweet yet naïve old innkeeper they are wed in order to rent her last bed: a double she reserves for married couples.Within that room they might get a little carried away with the "married couple" act.
Relationships: My Unit | Byleth/Claude von Riegan
Series: the things you can't read aloud at the war table [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1684297
Comments: 24
Kudos: 274





	Only One Bed

His hand is solid at her shoulder. His eyes keep her warm within, even as his jacket keeps her warm without. He opens the door for her with a smile and a wink, throwing some money to a messy little girl to tie their horses up in the barn. 

“Sorry to get you caught in this weather,” he says. 

His vibrato always belies a knowingness she has come to accept from him. Who’s to tell when that confidence is false and he is tripping over himself in his mind - as he so often does - and when he is truly so in control. As it stands, his swagger would have her believe he had opened the skies himself and bid the rain fall so that they might be tucked together in a cozy little village inn for the night. 

Else he had taken cues from his wyvern that it might rain. She’d heard the beasts could smell storm clouds miles off. 

She could not be sure, however, and had learned that assumptions about Claude were often either wrong or playing right into his hands. 

He does not take his jacket from her once they are inside. Instead his arm goes back around her, his gloved hand giving her a reassuring squeeze to the arm. He guides her forward to the stranger behind the desk - a short, pleasant-looking old woman with a smile that looked steady, as though it was her most natural expression.

“Good evening,” she says, adjusting in her stool and toying with her glasses. 

The woman leans in, peering at them. Byleth, no matter how pleasant the person, has always hated examinations of the sort. She finds herself turning into Claude’s side and that reassuring squeeze comes backs. 

“Good evening, ma’am,” Claude smiles. “Quite the sudden downpour outside. We’re looking for some rooms to wait it out.”

“So are many travelers,” she sighs. “I only have one room left for the night.”

“We’ll take that then,” Claude smiles. “How much for the night?”

“It’s a single bed for two,” the woman says. “I reserve it for married couples, to keep the place from becoming a ‘destination.’ You understand.”

Byleth does not. 

Evidently Claude does, however, and he plays along. “Of course, how fortunate for my wife and me, then.”

It’s her queue and so she nods. Whatever games Claude plays to get them somewhere safe and dry she will gladly join in. “We’ve been married six years now.”

Claude eyes her, something sparkling in his eye. It rings true when he sighs. “It’s been a marvelous six years.”

“Oh, wonderful! I supposed as much when you walked in,” The old woman breathes out something sounding like relief. “Your man seems to dote on you, dear. If I was wrong I would have hated to turn you out into the cold.”

Byleth does not miss the way Claude holds her tighter to his side. It could be part of the charade but the way his chest puffs out certainly is not. 

"Might I see a ring, dear?" The woman has a toothy grin, she notices. It reminds her of Raphael's when she promises to make him an extra portion. "Formality, I'm afraid. Just a policy here."

It is a silly policy, Byleth wants to tell her. And one she made herself to enforce under her roof. No anvil hangs above her head should she not ensure the private statuses of her clientele. 

Claude, still playing nicely, reaches into a pouch tucked into his waist cloth. He loses none of the surety that makes his game convincing.

He produces a ring, held and displayed between thumb and pointer. It is a silver wedding band inlaid with peridots: two small stones to border the dazzling centrepiece, expertly cut to reflect light into an ethereal glow. 

"My wife was so afraid to lose it while we rode," he says, holding the ring out for their host's poor vision to focus on. "She asked me to carry her ring."

The innkeeper's mouth falls ajar. “Oh, he does dote on you. What a ring!”

Byleth smiles the breezy way she had seen Claude smile a million times before, the way she practiced in the mirror. It was the one she used when any real semblance of joy felt forgotten and out of reach. 

Yes, the woman is right; Claude must dote on whoever he carried that ring for. 

They are shown to their room promptly, the in keeper more eager than ever to be of service. Anyone with such an impressive ring for his wife might make for a generous tipper, after all. 

Soft, warm night shifts are arranged for them - as they had not prepared to spend the night on the road. Their hostess laid them out on the bed. Byleth’s is long and trimmed in frills at the end of the sleeves and skirt. Claude’s is barely more than a night shirt, reaching only so far down the leg so as to not be entirely immodest.

They stand at the end of the bed, staring at powder blue sheets and cotton blend shifts in silence. 

“I suppose we’ll need to change,” Claude says. 

If his heart stutter’s the way Byleth’s pulse does in her wrist he makes quite the convincing show of ignoring it.

“I will face the eastern wall and you the west,” Byleth answers, snatching the frilled gown. “We will turn only after my queue.”

Claude chuckles. “Ever the strategist, my friend.”

Byleth flushes, but, again, Claude plays the brilliant actor and ignores it.

He turns as instructed and only then does Byleth begin to strip down. She can hear him doing the same. While she folds her layers as she goes - his jacket, her shirt, her trousers and so forth - he let’s them fall. 

Even in the dark with her back to him she imagines his lazy grace. 

Byleth feels heat imagining his belt stripped from him when she hears a plunk on the floor. She burns with the slip of breeches over his leg falling to the floor.

One last rustle of fabric and Claude calls over to her. "Are you decent?"

She realizes she is bare. That thoughts of his mess and his ring and his body circulate through her mind and that the shift lays at her feet in wait still. 

"No," she tells him. 

Claude's feet pad on the creaking wood panels. He's shifting his weight, impatient but willing to comply. "Alright."

She tries to bend down, to reach for the shift. But she is cold and aware she wonders if he imagines her the way she has imagined him. 

She wonders if his palms grow damp and a heat pools in his belly. 

"Decent yet?" He asks again. 

"No." She gulps. "But you can look...if you'd like."

There is silence. Then the padding of feet. She holds a breath and waits for anything: words, a breath, a hum, a groan. 

Instead the silence prevails. 

"Am I decent?" Byleth asks, a quiet bit of humour to break through them. It comes through parched like dry ice. 

"Turn around." Claude says. "Then ask me again."

The sound is as warm, as slow and as steady as she needs it to be. She feels something flutter in her rib cage with his encouragement.

Slowly, she turns. 

"Am I - "

"More than," he cuts her off. "You're beautiful, Byleth." 

And so she is red. The colour paints her skin from cheeks to chest. 

His gaze is set to her. It is not the steady one or the calculating one she is so accustomed to. There is something frantic in the ways his eyes move. No pattern can be distinguished, no line he follows up and down the sight of her. It's as though he tires to take her all in at once when his mind will only allow him fragments of his focus. 

"Do you want to see me?" He asks. 

Byleth's mouth goes dry. She speaks her next words as though through sand on her tongue. "Don't you want to save that view?"

He smirks. "Because I am so pure, surely I must be waiting for marriage."

Byleth frowns. "For the lady that ring is for."

He softens, brow going lax and eyes wide as he smiles. As he laughs. She feels something joyful as he strips himself. He is half hard and swollen pink beneath his shift and she blushes to think she might be the cause. 

He bends down to pull the rink from his pouch and he stands once more to hold for her as he did for the innkeeper. 

"It's as I said," he tells her. "This is your ring. I'm just holding it for you."

She squirms in place, unsure. "For tonight."

"Longer," he says. "If you want it."

Claude climbs onto the bed and waves her to him. With a creak Byleth kneels with him on the mattress. He holds out his hand and she places hers in his on an instinct she did not know she had. 

"It's your ring," he says, placing it on her finger. 

It is a game, she realizes. 

Even as she marvels at the peridot, even as the weight of it feels natural on her, she knows it will be missing by morning. Even so -

Byleth reaches between them. He hisses as she takes him in hand. There is little doubt he can feel the cool metal of their fib on her hand as she strokes him. There is less that he likes it as he groans, forehead falling to meet hers, eyes hazy and dark with lust. 

"This is my ring," she agrees finally. "And I am your wife."

She feels him grow harder in her hand. 

"Oh, Byleth, yes."

She gasps as hands come to her hip. He pulls her up, into his lap. 

Something is to come past his lips. Words, no doubt, but Byleth wants none of them. So she gives him the smallest of squeezes and rewards him with a faster pace and a thumb running over the head of his cock. Whatever words he was forming comes out as a moan. 

"And you love me?"

She wonders if it is too large a lie to ask him to make. Yet he pledges his love gladly to her, with a speed that has her nearly believing him. 

"I love you, my darling," he tells Byleth. "I'd vow it before every god and every empty heaven that would bear witness."

"I love you too." He does not need to know how honest she is.

He kisses her with a gale force she could picture bending mountains. He grasps her wrist in his hand, pulls her arms around his shoulder and brings her down in his lap. She can feel his hardness against her belly and the damp drip of arousal over his head onto her skin. She whimpers into his mouth as he grinds himself between them and slips his tongue between her lips. 

She had dreamt of this. Worse, she had actively raised scenes like this one in her mind when she lay in bed alone working through knots in her nerves. But even in those dreams and fantasies she had not imagined the ardour with which he held her. 

He must be desperate, she thinks. He must be starved for touch. He must be thinking of her as I think of him. 

There was no other way for her mind to rationalize the fire he held for her tonight. No one had ever wanted her this badly, not that she was aware of. She had not thought it possible. 

She pulls from him, gasping for air. He seems out of nothing, ready to dive into kisses at her shoulder. Like he has been breathing her all this time and this endless attention of his mouth is his way of coming up for air after years without it. 

He kisses up her throat and whispers in her ear. 

"You love me," he says, and it sounds incredulous, amazed even. "But do you want me?"

The answer should be obvious. But, in case it is not, in case she has missed some fundamental step of showing her desire, she takes a hand from her hip and guides his fingers between her legs. 

"Who made you so wet?" He laughs. "It couldn't be me, love. It must be the rain."

"Wives want their husbands, don't they?"

She has never heard her voice like this. So sing-song, so trilled. She likes the way he makes her sound as he begins to toy with her, his fingers slipping just past her lips before withdrawing. 

"I can't speak to wives," he says. "But I most certainly want mine, tonight."

Tonight. 

She shudders and sinks down on his fingers. He sinks inside her easily. He coos in her ear and praises her as she bounces on the digits, moaning his name. 

It is only for tonight. She has him for tonight.

Perhaps he has a lady love he intends to marry another night. Perhaps this ring has been on many fingers before hers as he played this very same game. Perhaps - from the way he hardens and twitches when she calls him her husband, when she calls herself his wife - this is simply a fetish he likes to indulge in. 

It doesn't matter. 

She has been given tonight. She is grateful for tonight. 

"Byleth," he says her name like it is his pleasure they chase. He is untouched, without stimulation yet his brow grows slick and drips as he picks up their pace together. "You feel so good, my love."

She's glad for it. 

She mewls as he catches his lips round a nipple and sucks. The added sensation helps the build. Her bouncing becomes frantic, his fingers work through her well. His tongue lashes over pink, satiny skin. 

She comes with a shout that Claude hurries to catch between his lips, pulling from her breast to bring her head down to him.

As his fingers leave her he smiles, eases away from their kiss. "Not so loudly, love. There are people sleeping."

She nods. 

He lays her down, pressing his lips to her forehead and nestling his body between her thighs. 

"We can stop," he tells her. 

His length presses firm into her hip and Byleth cannot help but laugh. "Why would we?"

He smiles. He kisses her. He takes himself in hand and she can feel his dripping tip at her entrance. 

"If you want me then tell me again," he says. "Tell me again that you love me."

"I love you." It is easier even now that it was the last time she said it. 

The brightness of his eyes, the fullness of his smile, touches her in way more intimate even than the feel of him slipping inside her. Both in tandem overwhelms her in the most pleasant of ways. 

He sheaths himself within her and, once he is settled he kisses her again. They become a mass of limbs and sweat and slick skin writhing against skin. She becomes evermore thankful for his lips as they swallow whole her gasps and moans. She drinks his own sounds from him; they taste sweeter than any wine. 

When his hips become weighted and urgent she scratches patterns into his back to hold back her moans. She pulls from his lips to wail into his shoulder and he whispers her name in her ear like a prayer as she does. 

"Love you. Oh, Byleth. Love."

She is desperate enough at this pinnacle to believe him. 

His thrusts become uneven. With a final croaking sound in the back of his throat he pulls from her and paints her belly with his ecstacy. He does not let that stop his hand from slipping one more between them to help her over that edge as well. 

She falls asleep to his whispers in her ear: humming to her, swearing his love first on the great spirits of nature and then by whatever his eyes happen to land on. 

As she was desperate enough before to believe him, now she is tired enough to do so. 

"I love you," she curls into his chest. 

Her eyes flutter shut. 

…

Byleth wakes to the glow of the peridot on her finger and the smell of fresh pastries wafting from the foot of the bed. 

Claude stands before a serving tray balanced there. He is preparing their favourite tea just the way Byleth likes it besides an assortment of breakfast pastries and some sweet sugary ones he knows she's fond of. 

"How did I know," he laughs to himself. "That as soon as I started pouring the pine tea that you'd actually wake up."

Byleth blinks away confusion but sits up regardless. "Because you know me well, I suppose."

"I know you even better now," he winks.

Byleth chooses not to respond. She only sighs, his words reminding her that the night is long past. 

She begins to slip the ring from her finger but Claude raises a brow, freezing her in place. "What are you doing?"

"Returning the ring," she answers. 

Claude only shrugs. "If you like. It's your ring, after all. If you want to give it back for dramatic tension then by all means; I'll keep it safe for you."

She is even more confused now. "You don't want the ring back?"

Claude finishes his work at the tray, crooking his finger for Byleth to join him for breakfast as he seats himself on the end of the bed. 

"You'll have to return it after the war just long enough for me to propose to you properly," he says. "But besides all that you can do as you please."

It takes a second for the words to sink in. It takes a second more for Byleth to act on them. When she does her movement is swift, fierce. 

Her lips are on his and she is dragging him deeper into the bed once more. Last night was such a melancholic romp. 

She'll be needing a joyful bedding filled with declarations she knows she can trust to make up for it.


End file.
